The present disclosure relates generally to storage capacity in a data storage system, and more specifically, but not by limitation, to decreasing storage capacity loss due to defects of a storage medium in a data storage system.
The ever increasing popularity of electronic mobile devices has correspondingly included an increased demand for small sized high capacity data storage systems. Some types of data storage systems utilize magnetic recording technology. Often, to increase storage capacity in these types of systems includes an attempt at increasing areal densities, which can be accomplished through improvement in data heads including transducers and media components. In spite of the success in increasing areal densities, other ways to improve storage capacity are needed. For example, various improvements in format efficiency of the medium have been addressed to increase storage capacity, such as reducing preamble length of a data sector and reducing error correction code (ECC) symbols.
It has been determined that by increasing data sector size from the normal 512 bytes to more than 4096 bytes has dramatically reduced the FCC symbols needed without sacrificing correction capability. In addition, a reduction in FCC symbols also improves format efficiency. While increasing data sector size has shown these positive results, increasing data sector size has also shown some problems. One such problem is mapping defects on the increased data sector size using conventional mapping techniques. In particular, data sector-based defect mapping can eliminate format efficiency gain obtained from increasing data sector size.